in the Racing Post. Owners pinched their bottoms, but they didn’t thrust fistfuls of tenners into their jeans pockets for racking up wins and turnout prizes.
To Tresa and Michelle, Tommy was the school swat, always working, always putting the stupid horses first, because she had nothing else with which to fill her life. They couldn’t appreciate that the public adored Tommy because she always smiled and although no one hugged and patted her horses more enthusiastically when they won, she comforted them and their jockeys equally lovingly when they lost.
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This festering jealousy erupted one late January evening after the Larkminster Cup, when traditionally jockeys and stable lads and lasses from neighbouring yards joined up at a Larkminster club called Electric Blue for a party.
On this occasion, the drinking was very heavy, both to celebrate Furious’s victory and to blot out a hideous death. Harvey-Holden had run the lovely little mare called Gifted Child, who had never really fulfilled the promise she had shown when she was trained by Marius. He had therefore instructed his hired assassin, Vakil, who had so terrorized Bullydozer, to slip Gifted Child a bucket of water before the race.
As a result, she broke a blood vessel and her off fore, landing clumsily six out. Struggling up, she collapsed trying to jump the next fence. Her stable lass had gone home in tears. Vakil, unmoved, had pocketed £300 from Harvey-Holden, and this evening was intending to lay a stable lass or at least a prostitute. ‘Why you no kiss me?’ he was asking Tresa.
‘Because you’re not a good kisser,’ she snapped back.
Vakil worked forty-eight weeks a year and sent his wages home to support his wife and four children in Pakistan, whom he boasted would one day become dentists and lawyers and keep him in his old age. Tonight he was planning to enjoy himself.
The party from the racing yards was seated at a long table looking down on a dance floor filled with writhing couples and surrounded by more packed tables. As well as Tresa and Vakil, the racing party included Josh, Michelle, little Angel and jockeys Johnnie Brutus and Dare Catswood, who’d had a second at Larkminster, and Dare’s brother Jamie. Jamie was Harvey-Holden’s new pupil assistant, who claimed he wanted to train horses but was really more interested in getting up at midday and shagging stable girls.
Jamie had a loud voice, wore red cords and a striped scarf – a prat in a cravat – and was accepted because Mummy had horses in training and rich Daddy was a member of the Jockey Club. Jamie was good with owners and at opening champagne bottles, and it was agreed H-H needed someone like that.
The group were all shouting with laughter. Yelling to make themselves heard over Lily Allen and the pounding of the disco, they gazed through visibility much thicker than the fog at the races earlier, in order to play a game called Snog-a-Trog. Snog-a-Trog involved each person in the party picking out a really unattractive member of the opposite sex – which was often hard through the gloom – and seeing how quickly they could snog them. Jamie, whose new job it was to time horses on H-H’s gallops and who was already very drunk, was randomly timing progress with a stopwatch.
Michelle, looking sexually predatory in tight red-leather trousers and a red see-through shirt with a red bra underneath, had kicked off. She had approached a bespectacled geek in shortsleeved crimplene and with a mullet, who’d been dancing around waving his arms like an over-adrenalized tic-tac man, only to be primly told he was engaged. Josh was now across the room dancing with a girl with a turbot’s face and a huge bust, which rather precluded him getting close enough to kiss her.
This caused as much mirth as the fact that Awesome Wells, who had been expected to join the party after whizzing up to Wetherby, had afterwards got into the wrong private jet, fallen asleep and ended up in Dubai.
Amber, who was also riding at Wetherby, and Rogue, who was riding at Fairyhouse, were expected later, as was Rafiq. After his great win in the Larkminster Cup, Rafiq was doing a television interview about being the latest role model for young Muslims.
Great excitement was caused by the arrival of Eddie Alderton, a very blond American flat jockey who had grown too heavy and tall to do the weights, and was trying his luck as a jump jockey at Rupert Campbell-Black’s yard, Penscombe.